User:Glenn6502

My tension between "this is cool" and "I don't have time to contribute" resolved on the side of opening an account.

I'm a computer programmer in the U.S. with spouse and children. I have in the past been a news reporter, editor, and technical writer. My hobby interests are more than I have time for, but include music (guitar and arranging) and stories (and therefore researching primary documents).

Since Glenn was already used as a user name, I appended the name of the first assembly language I learned. I no longer own a 6502 CPU, but I do own two 68000s.

Glenn6502 21:52, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Tonight I see for the first time ever a warning from Wikipedia:

WARNING: Your browser is not unicode compliant, please change it before editing an article.

Since I run the most recent browsers that have been released for my hardware/OS, looks like I'm unable to contribute further to Wikipedia until I can afford a new computer. Bye for now.

Glenn6502 29 June 2005 01:54 (UTC)

I'm back with a current IE that Wikipedia likes.

A musing after working with Wikipedia a year. I still think the concept is amazingly amazing. But I am saddened that we don't yet have an adequate solution to the problem of vandalism on Wikipedia.

Two anecdotes that give a good feeling for my feeling. I used to use Wikipedia at work. Then, twice, people at my place of work stumbled upon (different) pages that had been vandalized with pornography. Wikipedia is now banned at my place of work.

Wikipedians like to brag that vandalism can be detected and repaired in minutes. That may be true, especially for blatant examples. But I find more examples of subtle vandalism, which probably do more damage in the long run. In June 2006 while reading a Wikipedia science article, I noticed that a vandal had altered two words in a sentence, which had the effect of changing the meaning of a scientific principle. I reverted the vandalism, and found from the history that it was made two weeks previous. Thousands of people might have learned an incorrect version of science in those two weeks.

The Register likes to say Wikipedia would be a good thing if it were more truthfully titled Jimbo's Big Bag O' Trivia. I have to admit there's some truth to that. When I look up anything important in Wikipedia, I have to be willing to spend some time cross-checking what I find here.

Still, I'm happy to have made some small contributions. I'm hanging in there and hoping that the past won't be what it used to be.

Glenn6502 02:14, 7 July 2006 (UTC)